Content Management is a confusing term, not least because it is used in several contexts, ranging from digital asset management (i.e. handling thousands of images or movie clips) through document management (i.e. handling thousands of digital files, e.g. Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, etc, and/or scanned paper documents) and on to web content management, which is a combination of these but usually on a smaller scale. So, let us be more specific – we’re talking here of “web content management” and, to be thoroughly pedantic, “web content management systems” (or “web content management software” – the terms are largely interchangeable).

Web Content Management System

A “web content management system”, such as edeptive?, works at several levels – first, it allows one or more people to login to a website and change the text and/or pictures (video, PDFs, etc.) which appear on that website. By enabling the people who create content to easily publish that content to the web, this is very handy. Second, it controls who can see each item of content, and when that content is visible to the outside world.

Content Management versus Page Management

Many systems on the market are only “page” management systems – they allow users to control what appears on a web page. If you only ever expect your content to appear on a web page then this is fine but looking to the future it is increasingly likely that you will want your content available on other devices – PDAs, mobile WAP, interactive TV or even Teletext. A full content management system, such as edeptive?, gives you control over individual items of content, of which many may appear on a single web page or just one might appear on a WAP device. These systems also make it far easier to update the appearance of your content – you can easily change the templates controlling how pages appear, including how much content appears on each page.

Templates and their Variations

All content management systems use templates to display database content in a pleasing and useful form. Much of the power of a content management system comes from the flexibility of its templates. edeptive?, for example, uses tags ranging from “do it all for me” to thoroughly pedantic general programming constructs. This allows the templates to do pretty much anything you can think up. The best content management systems even allow variations on templates, based on browser properties, user information, what day it is, etc. edeptive?, of course, allows variations for a wide range of such parameters. Ideally, templates can pull in content from many sections of a site and from external sources (e.g. using RSS and other XML-based formats).

Application Modules

However, that’s just the beginning, at least for a decent content management system. The web contains lots of text and pictures but it becomes far more useful when it also incorporates some functionality, which can be anything from a free-text search of the site to a bespoke application for, say, tracking a pan-European project from conception to fruition. This is where the better content management systems stand out – they operate as containers for such applications, where all the necessary underlying functionallity to deal with multiple users, their rights, work flow, security, etc are handled by the core of the CMS.

E-Commerce

One obvious application is e-commerce. Stand-alone e-commerce systems are in themselves a limited form of content management, applied just to product information. The better content management systems all incorporate e-commerce so that the site owner only need learn one system – imagine the confusion if you have to use one set of tools for maintaining your products and a completely different set of tools for maintaining everything else on your site.

A further advantage of integrating e-commerce into a content management system is that everything that appears on a web site can be given a price – you can charge for downloading content as well as for real products. It even becomes possible to allow visitors to add content to the site – and charge them for doing so (e.g. classified ads).

Languages

Words, mots, Worter, etc. Ah, languages! Even in this age of all pervasive English most people would prefer to read in their mother tongue so any web site with multi-national pretences needs to have its content available in multiple languages. Some content management systems allow each item of content to be stored in as many languages as you need (auto-translation is not normally used as it generally produces gibberish).

Customer Relationship Management

Such applications allow your users to get more out of a site but there is a further area that allows a site owner to get more out of the site’s users – this is where CMS blends into CRM (“content management system” into “customer relationship management”). Allowing visitors to register with a site, then using cookies and/or a login to track each of their visits to the site, allowing the possibility of tracking which areas of the site are of most interest to various groups, as well as providing the site owner with a growing list of e-mail addresses and mobile numbers to which relevant e-mails and/or SMS messages can be sent.

Import and Export of Content (XML, CSV, web services, etc.)

No content management system is an island. Much of the content will be entered by hand as and when it becomes available or changes but some content may already exist on other computer systems and you don’t want to be re-typing all of that. XML is the preferred option for passing data from one system to another but it’s often the case that CSV (Comma Separated Variables) text files are easier to come by so a good content management system will be capable of importing/exporting both XML and CSV.

Web Services allow developers to make one system to interact with another. This can be simple information retrieval but Web Services can be used to give access to almost every function an application is capable of. So, searches, information updates and lots of other functions can be performed ‘cross-system’.

Extensibility (Attributes, etc.)

Every content management system is based on a database and every database will have a fixed number of fields for storing your information. And you can guarantee that the available fields will not quite match what you need for your business. The good content management systems get around this by enabling you to extend the system, usually by adding extra “attributes” to the built-in fields in each module.

Ease of Use

“The more powerful a system is the harder it is to use.” This is usually the case but web content management systems may be administered by anyone in an organisation so must remain easy to use, however powerful they may be. A clear and consistent user interface is essential to ensure all those who need to can keep their information up-to-date without lengthy training. This is especially true for those people in an organisation who only occasionally need to update something.

Personalisation

(Personalization for those who prefer z words)

Ideally you would like to ensure that each visitor to your site gets to see the content that is most relevant to that visitor. This is known as “personalisation” and is controlled in a variety of ways, depending on the content management system you use (without a content management system it isn’t possible). Some CMS products allows all content to be categorised, using hierarchical categories. Any item of content can appear in any number of categories. Visitors who register with a site can categorise themselves (e.g. by ticking checkboxes on your registration form) or can be categorised by the site administrator(s). The personalisation system then matches content to visitor.

Files and other associated Documents

It is quite possible that the 2MB Word document you have would not make a sensible web page. And as for the 200 column Excel spreadsheet… Few people will read reams of text from a computer screen and browsers were never designed to print pages nicely. The solution is to allow documents to be uploaded to the web server and associated with an item of content. The item of content can be a summary or précis of the associated document(s) or those documents may provide background material for an item that could stand on its own.

You might even use this facility in an extranet or intranet to put common files in an accessible place – relegating the content item itself to the role of descriptor for a collection of files. A worthy content management system will allow users to upload any number of documents of any type and associate them with specific content items. The content management system might even make these documents searchable, though the content item itself (especially if it has separate keywords) may prove a more effective key. edeptive? also allows you to require visitors to part with vital information (e.g. e-mail address) before they can download associated files, or even to charge for access to such documents, should this take your fancy.

Images – Photos, Thumbnails, Galleries…

The most common type of file one wants to associate with an item of content is the image, be it photograph, icon, sketch, diagram, … There is quite a variety of image formats available to the connoisseur but only two or three which work in web browsers. Added to which, users of the Internet may have ancient 56K modems – they will not be pleased if they have to download huge images. So, your content management software must have the ability to upload images, in a variety of formats, to resize them to fit the web site pages and to store them in a format that compresses well and works in web browsers. In addition, the content management system should allow you to associate as many images as you require with each item of content. And it would be helpful if the content management software could create thumbnails automatically.

Any content management system worth its salt can be used for web sites (Internet), restricted access web sites (Extranet) and internal communications (Intranet).

At its simplest, an extranet is just an Internet site with access restrictions on some (or all) of the sections. Access can be restricted to individuals, groups, visitors with specific attributes, etc. However, extranets become more useful when they provide access to information from your internal systems. This requires the content management software to extract information from other systems, to accept information passed from other systems, or even to pass a user on to another system – preferably without the user having to login again.

Intranets require everyone to login, though the login can be automatic if the user can be recognised from their Windows login or similar. Intranets generally allow access to multiple sources of information outside the content management system. They may also require the facility to upload large numbers of documents – Word files, Excel spreadsheets, etc. – so the content management system needs to be able to handle large quantities of such documents.

Dynamic v Static

There are two basic approaches to content managed sites – dynamically generated pages or static pages generated when the content changes or at regular intervals. Static pages will always be faster (it’s just a text file which the web server sends to a browser) but personalisation is practically impossible and there’s always the risk that an old version of a page will get cached by an ISP between your web server and a visitor to your site – you can’t easily control when the ISP’s cache gets updated. Static pages have an interesting advantage in that the content management software can be on one server whilst the static pages it generates reside on a different (or multiple) servers. Some content management systems, such as edeptive?, can do both or even mix the two – some sections of a site can be static whilst others (say, those requiring personalisation) are dynamically generated each time a visitor requests them. It’s even possible to have dynamic pages which include static sub-pages – a neat way of improving the generation speed of a complicated page, while still allowing some personalization.

Software as a Service versus Licensed

Content management software is available in two ways – you buy a licensed copy of the software to run on your own server(s) or you rent the software as an ASP service provided by software company or one of its partners. The ASP option allows you to keep the initial capital costs low, but like any rental agreement you continue to pay for the service for as long as you use it. Purchasing a licensed copy means a much greater up-front cost but keeps recurring costs to a minimum.

Rollback

An interesting aspect of holding a full version history of all content is that it becomes possible to “roll back” the site to a given date to see what what was shown. It’s unlikely that you would want to actually change the site back to that date but being able to view pages as they appeared on given dates could be useful for legal reasons. Of course, to do this you need to hold on to every version of each content item, and every version of each template and so on but it is possible and disk space is very cheap these days.

WorkFlow

When John adds a item of content, who needs to be informed so they can check it? If one of those checkers isn’t happy, does John get notified or does someone else need to look at the item? And so on, ad infinitum.

If you’re not sure what workflow means, just think about what happens to a printed document in your organisation. In a small company, it’s quite possible that one person writes a press release and sends it straight off. Larger organisations may have strict procedures dictating which people need to check it, and in what order, before any document can be seen by the outside world. Your content management system needs to be flexible enough to handle your workflow. Preferably the workflow will be easy to set up, with rules for alerting individuals or groups or anyone in a given role. Ideally you can specify a review date for any item of content, so that another work flow process can be kicked off at that date.

Meta Tags and Meta Information

Information about your information. Your CMS needs to provide facilities to add any meta information you might need – from simple “keyword” and “description” tags used mainly by robots, pics-label information used by internet filtering software, through to Dublin Core tags and the whole eGIF shebang required by government bodies. If you’re not sure what any of this looks like, right-click your mouse on the page, choose “View Source” and you’ll see lots of <META name=”keyword” value=”content mangement system” /> tags at the top of the HTML – you can, of course, add any others you want on your own site, applying to the site as a whole or to individual pages.

Schools have a huge amount of activities taking place during their term times and their web sites are some of the busiest and most frequently updated of any that we deal with. Parents, children and staff all turn to the school web site to see what is going on and to be updated on important information. Particularly important to any school is the calendar. St Catherine’s see this as being key to the success of their new site and we were able to show them school calendars already in operation on school sites we have already developed.

If your business takes on fixed price projects like us, you probably discover that you are going to have a time overrun only after the budgeted hours have been exceeded. After years of trying to find a smart solution to this problem we decided to ‘scratch our own itch’.

We are developing a web application called Mousetrap which will help us (and perhaps you) better manage our fixed price projects.

Follow our progress with Mousetrap by visiting the Mousetrap Blog.